Bell hooks: Ethics From the Margins

Abstract

This article explores much of the body of bell hooks’s work. It analyzes her long trajectory from her opening salvo, Ain’tIaWoman, to her latest books and essays in a framework that contextualizes her explicit and implicit ethical stances in terms of issues of multiculturalism, feminism, and the media. Using a multipronged approach that questions central ethical questions of community, autonomy, voice, inclusion and exclusion, access, and representation, bell hooks challenges us to construct a transnational, feminist, and multiculturalist project that will allow us to interpret and criticize the contemporary situation and its popular culture. bell hooks stands out as an unflinching critic and contributor to a body of work that reminds us that much of our received intellectual traditions as well as new and current scholarly work, popular debates, and mass media products remain embedded in a framework of analysis, production, and representation that serves to oppress and not to liberate.